But what if fundamental research on what exactly these ‘pathogens’ are, how they infect us, has not yet even been performed? What if much of what is assumed and believed about the danger of microbes, particularly viruses, has completely been undermined in light of radical new discoveries in microbiology?

In this article I will take a less philosophical approach, and focus on influenza as a more concrete example of the Copernican-level paradigm shift in biomedicine and life sciences we are all presently fully immersed within, even if the medical establishment has yet to acknowledge it.

Deadly Flu Viruses: Vaccinate or Die?

The hyperbolic manner in which health policymakers and the mainstream media talk about it today, flu virus is a deadly force, against which all citizens, of all ages 6 months or older, need to take an annual influenza vaccine to protect themselves against, lest they face deadly consequences. Worse, those who hold religious or philosophical objections, or who otherwise conscientiously object to vaccinating, are being characterized as doing harm to others by denying them herd immunity (a concept that has been completely debunked by a careful study of the evidence, or lack thereof). For instance, in the interview below Bill Gates tells Sanjay Gupta that he thinks non-vaccinators “kill children”:

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But what if I told you that there isn’t even such a thing as “flu virus,” in the sense of a monolithic, disease vector existing outside of us, conceived as it is as the relationship of predator to prey?

First, consider that the highly authorative Cochrane collaboration acknowledges there are many different flu viruses that are not, in fact, influenza A — against which flu vaccines are targeted — but which nonetheless can contribute to symptoms identical to those attributed to influenza A:

Over 200 viruses cause influenza and influenza-like illness which produce the same symptoms (fever, headache, aches and pains, cough and runny noses). Without laboratory tests, doctors cannot tell the two illnesses apart. Both last for days and rarely lead to death or serious illness. At best, vaccines might be effective against only Influenza A and B, which represent about 10% of all circulating viruses.” (Source: Cochrane Summaries).” [emphasis added]

This makes for a picture of complexity that powerfully undermines health policies that presuppose vaccination equates to bona fide immunity, and by implication, necessitates the herd collectively participate in the ritual of mass vaccination campaigns as a matter of social responsibility and necessity.

Even the use of the word “immunization” to describe vaccination is highly misleading. The moment the word is used, it already presupposes efficacy, and makes it appear as if non-vaccinators are anti-immunity, instead of what they actually are: pro-immunity (via clean air, food, water, and sunlight), but unwilling to subject themselves or their healthy children to “unavoidably unsafe” medical procedures with only theoretical benefits.

Why Flu Virus Doesn’t Exist (The Way We Were Told)

But the topic gets even more interesting when we consider the findings of a 2015 study entitled “Conserved and host-specific features of influenza virion architecture.” This was the first study ever to plumb the molecular depths of what influenza virus is actually composed of. Amazingly, given the long history of vaccine use and promotion, the full characterization of what proteins it contains, and where they are derived from, was never previously performed. How we invest billions of dollars annually into flu vaccines, and have created a global campaign to countermand a viral enemy, whose basic building blocks we don’t even know, is hard to understand. But it is true nonetheless.

The study abstract opens with this highly provocative line:

Viruses use virions to spread between hosts, and virion composition is therefore the primary determinant of viral transmissibility and immunogenicity.” [emphasis added]

Virion are also known as “viral particles,” and they are the means by which viral nucleic acids are able to move and ‘infect’ living organisms. Without the viral particle (taxi) to carry around the virus DNA (passenger), it would be harmless; in fact, viruses are often described as existing somewhere between living and inanimate objects for this reason: they do not produce their own energy, nor are transmissable without a living host. And so, in this first line, the authors are making it clear that virion composition is also the primary determinant in how or whether a virus is infectious (transmits) and what effects it will have in the immune system of the infected host.

Influenza viral particles

This distinction is important because we often think of viruses as simply pathogenic strings of DNA or RNA. The irony, of course, is that the very things we attribute so much lethality to — viral nucleic acids — are not even alive, and can not infect an organism without all the other components (proteins, lipids, extra-viral nucleic acids) which are, technically, not viral in origin, participating in the process. And so, if the components that are non-viral are essential for the virus to cause harm, how can we continue to maintain that we are up against a monolithic disease entity “out there” who “infects” us, a passive victim? It’s fundamentally non-sensical, given these findings. It also clearly undermines the incessant, fear-based rhetoric those beholden to the pro-vaccine stance to coerce the masses into undergoing the largely faith-based rite of vaccination.

Let’s dive deeper into the study’s findings…

The next line of the abstract addresses the fact we opened this article with: namely, that there is great complexity involved at the level of the profound variability in virion composition:

However, the virions of many viruses are complex and pleomorphic, making them difficult to analyze in detail”

But this problem of the great variability in the virion composition of influenza is exactly why the study was conducted. They explain:

Here we address this by identifying and quantifying viral proteins with mass spectrometry, producing a complete and quantifiable model of the hundreds of viral and host-encoded proteins that make up the pleomorphic virions of influenza virus. We show that a conserved influenza virion architecture, which includes substantial quantities of host proteins as well as the viral protein NSI, is elaborated with abundant host-dependent features. As a result, influenza virions produced by mammalian and avian hosts have distinct protein compositions.”

In other words, they found that the flu virus is as much comprised of biological material from the host the virus ‘infects,’ as the viral genetic material of the virus per se.

How then, do we differentiate influenza virus as fully “other”? Given that it would not exist without “self” proteins, or those of other host animals like birds (avian) or insects, this would be impossible to do with any intellectual honesty intact.

There’s also the significant problem presented by flu vaccine production. Presently, human flu vaccine antigen is produced via insects and chicken eggs. This means that the virus particles extracted from these hosts would contain foreign proteins, and would therefore produce different and/or unpredictable immunological responses in humans than would be expected from human influenza viral particles. One possibility is that the dozens of foreign proteins found within avian influenza could theoretically produce antigens in humans that cross-react with self-structures resulting in autoimmunity. Safety testing, presently, does not test for these cross reactions. Clearly, this discovery opens up a pandora’s box of potential problems that have never sufficiently been analyzed, since it was never understood until now that “influenza” is so thoroughly dependent upon a host for its transmissability and immunogenecity.

Are Flu Viruses Really “Hijacked” Exosomes?

Lastly, the study identified something even more amazing:

Finally, we note that influenza virions share an underlying protein composition with exosomes, suggesting that influenza virions form by subverting micro vesicle” production.

What these researchers are talking about is the discovery that virion particles share stunning similarities to naturally occurring virus-like particles produced by all living cells called exosomes. Exosomes, like many viruses (i.e. enveloped viruses) are enclosed in a membrane, and are within the 50-100 nanometer size range that viruses are (20-400 nm). They also contain biologically active molecules, such as proteins and lipids, as well as information-containing ones like RNAs — exactly, or very similar, to the types of contents you find in viral particles.

In light of this post-Germ Theory perspective, viruses could be described as pieces of information in search of chromosomes; not inherently “bad,” but, in fact, essential for mediating the genotype/phenotype relationship within organisms, who must adapt to ever-shifting environmental conditions in real-time in order to survive; something the glacial pace of genetic changes within the primary nucleotide sequences of our DNA cannot do (for instance, it may take ~ 100,000 years for a protein-coding gene sequence to change versus seconds for a protein-coding gene’s expression to be altered via modulation via viral or exosomal RNAs).

This does not mean they are “all good”, either. Sometimes, given many conditions outside their control, their messages could present challenges or misinformation to the cells to which they are exposed, which could result in a “disease symptom.” These disease symptoms are often if not invariably attempts by the body to self-regulate and ultimately improve and heal itself.

In other words, the virion composition of viruses appears to be the byproduct of the cell’s normal exosome (also known as microvesicle) production machinery and trafficking, albeit being influenced by influenza DNA. And like exosomes, viruses may be a means of extracellular communication between cells, instead of simply a pathological disease entity. This could explain why an accumulating body of research on the role of the virome in human health indicates that so-called infectious agents, including viruses like measles, confer significant health benefits. [see: the Health Benefits of Measles and The Healing Power of Germs?].

Other researchers have come to similar discoveries about the relationship between exosomes and viruses, sometimes describing viral hijacking of exosome pathways as a “Trojan horse” hypothesis. HIV may provide such an example.

Concluding Remarks

The remarkably recent discovery of the host-dependent nature of the influenza virus’ virion composition is really just the tip of an intellectual iceberg that has yet to fully emerge into the light of day, but is already “sinking” ships; paradigm ships, if you will.

One such paradigm is that germs are enemy combatants, and that viruses serve no fundamental role in our health, and should be eradicated from the earth with drugs and vaccines, if possible.

This belief, however, is untenable. With the discovery of the indispensable role of the microbiome, and the subpopulation of viruses within it — the virome — we have entered into an entirely new, ecologically-based view of the body and its environs that are fundamentally inseparable. Ironically, the only thing that influenza may be capable of killing is germ theory itself.

For an in-depth exploration of this, watch the lecture below on the virome. I promise, if you do so, you will no longer be able to uphold germ theory as a monolithic truth any longer. You may even start to understand how we might consider some viruses “our friends,” and why we may need viruses far more than they need us.